Departure information

Responsible tourism

Environment

Our ground operators are aware of our interest in making sure water usage and waste management are handled responsibly, particularly at high-impact locations such as Machu Picchu that see hundreds of tourists visiting every day. For example, our guests stay at Inkallpa Lodge in the Sacred Valley, an accommodation which makes great efforts to operate as sustainably as possible. They implement a food management system to reduce wastage, and 70% of their overall waste is recycled. They perform periodic maintenance to ensure that there are no dripping pipes or taps wasting water, and they have a digester of waste water which separates grey water to be reused for garden irrigation.

We encourage clients to give us feedback at their return or at destination, if our ground operators are not compliant with responsible practices. At our UK office, we aim to utilise fewer printed marketing and communication materials, encouraging customers to order the online version of our brochure and ensuring every experience we offer has enough online information.

In other efforts, we are the official travel partner of ArBolivia Project, an initiative founded by The Cochabamba Project, in conjunction with approximately 1,000 smallholder families, that focuses on reforestation and sustainable land use within the tropical regions of Bolivia. The ArBolivia Project takes a business approach and splits the profits from timber revenues equally with farmers, rather than paying local people a salary and exporting most of the profit overseas. This way, the project is far more likely to be sustainable, and ultimately successful, by addressing social and environmental problems with a business solution.

It takes 25 years and more than £60 for a typical tree to reach sufficient maturity to be felled and exported, which is where ArBolivia relies on donations. Our project sponsorship programme guarantees a £60 donation for every person travelling with HighLives. 100% of donations go directly to the ArBolivia Project to ensure that farmers are paid and supported to enable their trees to grow and avoid slash and burn farming. We also encourage our customers to match this donation, which we facilitate on their behalf. The ArBolivia Project has been structured so that it can be replicated more widely, both within Bolivia and elsewhere and we look forward to supporting its expansion across Latin America in the future.

Community

We strive to improve lives in Latin America through tourism, and our use of local guides and focus on local dining, shopping and entertainment ensures that communities see direct financial benefit from the holiday you have booked.

Our customers are accompanied by a highly educated and knowledgeable guide who they can trust to look after them and provide a wealth of interesting information on the places they visit. All our guides are recruited from the local communities in order to provide as many employment opportunities as possible

All accommodation offered by us has been hand-picked and we look beyond impersonal hotels and focus on privately-owned, smaller accommodations with character and charm. Again, this helps to support local communities economically. The same goes for our choice of restaurants and eateries - we provide opportunities to savour mouth-watering meals incorporating the best local produce. At all costs we avoid mediocre food in ‘tourist’ restaurants that negatively impact the local culture of a place.